Poland travel guide

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Even though the country is more than 1,000 years old, Poland’s survival is something of a miracle. Its boundaries were continually redrawn over the course of eight centuries. Then suddenly the nation disappeared from the map. Between 1795 and 1918, Poland, wedged in the middle of Europe, ceased to exist for the world’s cartographers. Partitioned for a third time at the end of the 18th century by Prussia, Austria and Russia, Poland was reduced to a promise and a prayer for Poles, and the object of tug-of-war for more powerful states.

But that was only one aspect of Poland’s troubles; then the real tragedy occurred. Hitler and the Nazis invaded Poland, launching World War II, then extinguished many of its cities and eradicated 20 percent of its people, including nearly its entire Jewish population of three-and-a-half million – until then the largest Jewish community in Europe. Wars have befallen many countries in modern times, but few have been as thoroughly ravaged as Poland.

Yet Poland rebuilt itself from the rubble of war. From photographs, paintings, architectural drawings and the memories of its grief-stricken survivors, Poles reconstructed the Old Towns of Warsaw and Gdansk brick by brick, only to suffer four decades of Soviet-imposed Communist rule and grudging submission behind the Iron Curtain. Yet Poland asserted itself once more.

In the 1980s, the trade union movement Solidarity (Solidarnosc) helped to trigger the demise of Communism in Poland and throughout the Soviet bloc. Poland has survived with its culture, language, spirit and most of its territory intact, and in 2004 it joined the European Union, as a modern, independent nation.

Population and Religion
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Poland is a nation of a little under 39 million, the size of Spain. Its people are fervently Catholic – over 80 percent call themselves practising Catholics – and more conservative than many of their Western European neighbours. Throughout most of its history, Poland was an intensely cosmopolitan place, with Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Armenians and others living within its borders. During the Second Republic (1919–39), only two-thirds of its people were ethnic Poles. It has also traditionally been a land of religious tolerance. When medieval Europe was rocked by religious wars, Poland was a safe haven for Jewish, Protestant and Orthodox refugees – making the intolerance later inflicted by Germany on Polish territory all the more terrible.

Today, Poland is unusually homogenous in terms of ethnicity: some 98 percent of the people are Poles. The Jewish population was reduced to 250,000 after World War II, and today there are only a few thousand Jews living in Poland. The largest minority groups are Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.

Literacy rates are high, at a shade under 100 percent. Poles are well-educated, and young people in the larger cities speak English (much more so than German or Russian) with the same fluency and enthusiasm of those a couple of border lines west. They’re up-to-date on fashions, trends and music; they have mobile phones glued to their ears and e-mail accounts they tap into daily at internet cafés across the country.


A Blend of East and West
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Poland’s history as a territory coveted by great powers all around it ensured that the north–south divisions often seen elsewhere are, here, primarily east–west divisions. The west is more Germanic, organised, pragmatic and industrious, while the East has a reputation of being more Russian – which means, in short, relaxed, cultural and introspective. Poznan, for example, halfway between Berlin and Warsaw, revels in its business skills and organisational attitude. Kraków, the ancient capital much closer to Ukraine than Germany, is just as proud of its free-flowing cultural prowess and its status as a place where art and education override business (except, of course, for the business of tourism).

There has always been a cultural struggle between East and West in Poland. The Poles are a Slavic people, like their Ukrainian and Russian neighbours to the east. Yet their historical and cultural connections to the West are formidable. The Catholic Poles first took their religious cues from the West in the 10th century, and cultural epochs basic to Western Europe – the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, for example – were just as much a part of Polish society. The shared identity, as well as the uneasy conflicts, between East and West, have defined this land in ways that go far beyond geography.